In 2002, I got an award from the CIA for a science fair project in which I built a miniature radio transmitter. I was invited to the headquarters in Langley, went on a tour, and got some cool souvenirs, including quick-dissolving paper that was also edible.
Of the molecules shown below, atropine is the only one where nitrogen does not lie in the same plane as the other atoms of its ring. I don't know what the significance of that is.
Below are some pics of the chicken coop I built. I sawed all the planks myself. I also tried my hand at banana farming. I had better luck with that than raising chickens.
First, a recipe for bread from a survivor of the Yugoslav Wars. She calls it atomic bread. Easy to make and stays edible for a long time.
Bing says
***
The cost of ending world hunger is a complex issue and depends on various factors. According to a study backed by the German government, ending hunger by 2030 would come with a price tag of $330 billion. The study suggests that by targeting enhanced aid money more effectively and with greater innovation, a solution is possible. International donors would need to add another $14 billion a year to their spending on food security and nutrition over the next 10 years; more than twice their current contribution. Low and middle-income countries would also have to give another $19 billion a year, potentially through taxation.
However, the United Nations has suggested that just $160 per year for each person living in extreme poverty would eradicate world hunger by 2030. The money should be delivered through both cash transfers and “pro-poor” investments
***
GlobalGiving says:
***
Estimates of how much money it would take to end world hunger range from $7 billion to $265 billion per year.
Why such a big range? Because experts disagree about how to end world hunger. Hunger has many causes:
Bad weather
Disease outbreaks
Pests
War
Falling prices for crops
Rising prices for food
Low wages or unemployment
No single solution can address them all.
***
Greater cultivation of the Jerusalem artichoke could help:
***
The tubers can be eaten raw, cooked, or pickled.[9]
Before the arrival of Europeans, indigenous peoples cultivated H. tuberosus as a food source. The tubers persist for years after being planted, so the species expanded its range from central North America to the eastern and western regions.[citation needed] Early European colonists learned of this and sent tubers back to Europe, where they became a popular crop and naturalized there. It later gradually fell into obscurity in North America, but attempts to market it commercially were successful in the late 1900s and early 2000s.[7][10]
The tuber contains about 2% protein, no oil, and little starch.
...
Jerusalem artichokes have 650 mg potassium per 1 cup (150 g) serving. They are also high in iron and contain 10–12% of the USRDA of fiber, niacin, thiamine, phosphorus, and copper.[53]
***
It's tolerant of a wide range of conditions, easy to grow, and nutritious. It can also be preserved for long periods.
The different types of hunger need to be considered. Is it being caused by a lack of calories, a lack of nutrients, or both?
WHO says:
***
Iodine, vitamin A, and iron are the most important in global public health terms; their deficiency represents a major threat to the health and development of populations worldwide, particularly children and pregnant women in low-income countries.
***
Vitamins D and B12 are also noteworthy in this category.
Ugali, also called sadza and many other names, is a corn porridge eaten in many countries afflicted by chronic hunger. While it is cheap and filling, it is somewhat low in calories and nutrients. It is usually eaten with beans or vegetables.
It is possible to make flour with Jerusalem artichokes. That flour could be used to make ugali or sadza. I've also seen recipes where it is used to make pasta. I've never eaten Jerusalem artichokes myself, though it seems they taste like potatoes.
On the other hand, the inulin in Jerusalem artichokes can cause flatulence. That's not really any worse than what happens with various beans though.
Overclocking, cluster computing, and mineral oil cooling are not new ideas, yet they rarely have been combined. Let's look at some examples:
This is the top result on YouTube for the search "world's cheapest supercomputer":
I mention all this because rather than spend hundreds of dollars on a computer I don't need to test a concept that's already been proven, I thought it would be better to simply write an article about how to build a machine that combined all these useful ideas.
So here's how it should be done: Make a cluster of the desired size using Intel 13900K chips. Submerge the CPUs in mineral oil. Overclock the chips in 1 GHz implements until 90% of the available power supply is used. A regular US household outlet offers about 1500 W. That's enough power to get to at least 90 GHz. The 9 GHz crew above used 125 W to get there, so 90 GHz would need about 1250 W.
Microsoft did something similar a few years back when then submerged a data center in a waterproof shipping container:
***
Back in 2018, Microsoft sunk an entire data center to the bottom of the Scottish sea, plunging 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage 117 feet deep in the ocean. Today, the company has reported that its latest experiment was a success, revealing findings that show that the idea of an underwater data center is actually a pretty good one.
***
Microsoft’s underwater server experiment resurfaces after two years - The Verge
Good job, Microsoft. Next time, fill the container with mineral oil and then partially submerge it in cold water. Lake Michigan would be best as it has the coldest water in the lower 48. Mount the shipping container vertically in water, like the one on the left in the pic below:
***
Erasto Bartholomeo Mpemba (1950–2023)[note 1] was a Tanzanian game warden who, as a schoolboy, discovered the eponymously named Mpemba effect, a paradoxical phenomenon in which hot water freezes faster than cold water under certain conditions; this effect had been observed previously by Aristotle, Francis Bacon, and René Descartes.
He discovered the phenomenon at Magamba Secondary School in 1963 while preparing ice cream to earn pocket-money.[3] Due to lack of time, he skipped the cooling phase when preparing the ice cream and immediately put it into the freezer; unexpectedly, his milk mixture froze faster than that of his classmates.[2] His physics teacher at the time told him that his observation was clearly not possible.[2] A few years later, the head of Mpemba's school invited British physicist Denis Osborne (1932-2014) from the University of Dar es Salaam to give a guest lecture on his work.[4] At the end of the presentation, Mpemba asked the question that had been bothering him for so long: “If you take two beakers with equal volumes of water, one at 35°C and the other at 100°C, and put them into a refrigerator, the one that started at 100°C freezes first. Why?”[2] Teachers and classmates present thought the claim absurd and mocked Mpemba for the question. Osborne was also caught off guard, but was later able to prove experimentally the correctness of Mpemba's observations.[2][4] In 1969, during Mpemba's studies at the College of African Wildlife Management near Moshi, a paper that he and Osborne had written on the phenomenon was published.[5]
***
A lovely story that shows the importance of perseverance and having an open mind. Everyone who pays attention and asks questions can make a scientific discovery.
Here is probably the smartest idea I'll ever have.
First, take some time to watch this video (skip to the 15:10 mark):
Now look at this graph:
It's an asymmetric oscillation with one hump. If you iterate it, you get random numbers in the range of 100 to 200. It's a true random number generator and thus a one-way function. Furthermore, it describes a family of one-way functions. Any composite of trigonometric, logarithmic, and exponential functions will produce something similar. Of course, the initial value must be in the domain of ln(x) and produce an f(x) > 1. Else, the function approaches zero upon iteration.
Thus, a general equation for one-way functions and random number generators is:
f(x) = a*(b*sin(c*x) + d*ln(e*x))^f
Where a, b, c, d, e, and f are real numbers.
Note that when f(x) = r*(1-x) is iterated, chaos occurs when r = 3.759816
https://youtu.be/ovJcsL7vyrk?si=y8JO21psWtpq2TYS&t=312
***
In computer science, a one-way function is a function that is easy to compute on every input, but hard to invert given the image of a random input. Here, "easy" and "hard" are to be understood in the sense of computational complexity theory, specifically the theory of polynomial time problems.
***
***
The existence of such one-way functions is still an open conjecture. Their existence would prove that the complexity classes P and NP are not equal, thus resolving the foremost unsolved question of theoretical computer science.[1]: ex. 2.2, page 70 The converse is not known to be true, i.e. the existence of a proof that P≠NP would not directly imply the existence of one-way functions.[2]
***
Cool. I solved the P = NP problem too. You're terminated, fucker.
***
Although the P versus NP problem was formally defined in 1971, there were previous inklings of the problems involved, the difficulty of proof, and the potential consequences. In 1955, mathematician John Nash wrote a letter to the NSA, in which he speculated that cracking a sufficiently complex code would require time exponential in the length of the key.[5] If proved (and Nash was suitably skeptical), this would imply what is now called P ≠ NP, since a proposed key can easily be verified in polynomial time. Another mention of the underlying problem occurred in a 1956 letter written by Kurt Gödel to John von Neumann. Gödel asked whether theorem-proving (now known to be co-NP-complete) could be solved in quadratic or linear time,[6] and pointed out one of the most important consequences—that if so, then the discovery of mathematical proofs could be automated.
***
Archimedes was able to bracket the value of pi by constructing 96-sided polygons inside and outside a triangle. Since the diameter of the circle and the perimeters of the polygons were known, he was able to conclude that pi must be between
***
In the 3rd century BCE, Archimedes proved the sharp inequalities 223⁄71 < Ï€ < 22⁄7, by means of regular 96-gons (accuracies of 2·10−4 and 4·10−4, respectively).
***
My method of approximating pi assumes that a circle is a polygon with an infinite number of sides. In that case, pi is equal to n*cos(a/2), where n is the number of sides of a regular polygon and a is the measure of one of its interior angles as given by the formula (n -2)*180/n.
For n = 100,000, we get:
100,000*cos((100,000-2)*180/(100,000*2)) = 3.14159265
Those are indeed the first 9 digits of pi. My method probably has some computational advantages over other ways, though since pi has been calculated to many digits already, it's not particularly important.
For n = 1,000,000, I get pi = 3.1415926356
For n = 10,000,000, I get pi = 3.1415926533
The first 11 digits of pi are 3.1415926535.
The de jure one-party states are China, Cuba, Eritrea, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. So that's five.
Some of the larger de-facto ones are Russia, Japan, and Mexico. Some of the smaller ones are Singapore, Angola, Republic of Congo, Equitorial Guinea, and Rwanda. That's eight more, so 13 total.
Most monarchies are effectively one-party states, with the royal family being the ruling party. That includes Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Brunei, Eswatini, and Morocco. That's another 10, so 23 total.
There are countries like Venezuela, Turkmenistan, Belarus, and Syria, which are dictatorships, so four more. Then there are countries like Egypt and Burma which are run by the military. We're up to 29 now.
Iran's ruling mullahs have been in charge since 1979. The Turkish AK Party has been in charge since 2002. The CCM party in Tanzania has ruled since 1977.
The Taliban are in control of Afghanistan. Thailand spent long stretches under military rule. So that's 34.
I could keep going, but fortunately, Freedom in the World made a list already. 83 of 194 countries on it are not electoral democracies. The good news is another 84 countries are electoral democracies which are rated as "free". The remaining 27 are partly free.
I do not think one-party states are inevitable, but they are a common outcome. Once a country slides into one-party rule, it tends to stay there. They are also not always bad places to live, as Japan proves.
On the whole, it seems economic freedom is more important than political freedom to well-being. Economic freedom tends to promote political freedom.
The simplest one (probably) is used to treat methanol poisoning.
Some have core based on purine, such as aciclovir and entecavir. Several examples are shown below. It's interesting to note that antivirals in this group are structurally similar to the nucleotides adenine and guanine. That implies there are antivirals based similar to cytosine and thymine, which are pyrimidines.
